They are some of Britain’s most notorious and cold-hearted murderers, whose crimes have shocked the country. Yet these men might be free today if it were not for the national DNA database, which was launched 25 years ago. Hailed as the biggest breakthrough in the fight against crime since fingerprints, the world ’s first DNA database was set up in the UK to help solve crimes by storing and cross-referencing DNA samples collected from crime scenes and individuals. The law was later changed to allow DNA tests to be carried out on anyone convicted of any recordable offence, and today the database contains profiles for around 5.9million Brits. As well as over 217,000 crime scene DNA that has not yet been matched. Without it, these high-profile and brutal crimes would remain unsolved to this day, leaving dangerous killers roaming the UK’s streets… It was in 2002, seven years after the DNA database was launched, that a seemingly trivial DNA sample was uploaded from a 44-year-old man who had been convicted of stealing £80 from a pub till. Then, in November 2006, Suffolk police received a call from mum Kerry Nicol, worried that she hadn’t heard from her 19-year-old daughter Tania since she left their Ipswich home the previous evening. They launched a missing person’s inquiry, sparking the force’s biggest ever investigation. Two weeks later, the family of 25-year-old Gemma Adams reported her missing, and after her body was found in a brook, divers found Tania’s body two miles downstream. Two weeks after, on December 11, a member of the public found the naked body of another woman’, Anneli Alderton, 24, in woodland in Nacton, south of Ipswich, and the next day two other bodies were found, those of Annette Nicholls, 29, and Paula Clennell, 24. In a massive police investigation involving 600 officers from almost every force in the country, police made 1,500 door-to-door inquiries, scrutinised 11,000 hours of CCTV footage and searched 176 sites, but appeared no closer to finding the serial killer. Then on December 17 DNA collected from the bodies of the three women not dumped in water was put through the national database and a match was made to Steve Wright , a local resident who four years earlier had stolen money from a pub cash till. Early the following morning, 48-year-old Wright was arrested and charged, and in February 2008 jailed for life for all five murders - a number that would undoubtedly have risen if he hadn’t been caught so quickly. The brutal murder of 14-year-old Marian, as she cycled to a school clarinet lesson on a sunny Saturday morning, shocked the nation in June 1981 and led to a national manhunt for her killer. Her father, Trevor, would normally have driven her, but was playing in a cricket match so allowed her to cycle - a decision that was to haunt him for the rest of his life. The schoolgirl, the youngest of three sisters, was attacked on a canal towpath near Farnborough, Hants, and dragged into woodland where she was beaten, raped and strangled to death. But despite interviewing hundreds of people, police eventually drew a blank and the crime went unsolved. However, DNA traces the killer had left on Marion’s body, as well as her jeans and left sock, were added to the national DNA database when it was established 14 years later. Just four years after that, in 2001, Tony Jasinskyj, an Army chef who had been working at a barracks in Aldershot, a mile and a half from the murder scene, was arrested after assaulting his wife. His DNA was swabbed, and it matched with that held in the database. At a trial at Winchester Crown Court in May 2002 experts told the jury that the DNA evidence proved that the chances of the perpetrator being anyone other than Jasinskyj were one in a billion. He was jailed for life. When two young women living in bedsits in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, were brutally murdered in 1987, a national hunt began for the so-called ‘bedsit killer’. The naked body of Wendy Knell, the 25-year-old manager of a Supasnaps store in Tunbridge Wells, was found in her bloodstained bed in June. Five months later, waitress Caroline Pierce, 20, was abducted outside her bedsit and her naked body found in a flooded drain 40 miles away. Murder detectives investigated for months but eventually had to scale back the operation and the case remained unsolved for more than 30 years. However, DNA samples from Wendy’s body and Caroline’s tights were kept. Forensic scientists were later able to enhance both samples and in 2019 new checks on the national database showed a close match to a relative of the killer, eventually leading them to David Fuller . When police visited his home in Healthfield, East Sussex, Fuller’s DNA proved an exact match, while his fingerprint also matched a bloodied one found on a plastic bag in Wendy’s bedsit. But the breakthrough led to detectives uncovering evidence of another shocking crime. Searching his house, they found computer hard drives, CDs and floppy discs with more than 14million images showing Fuller abusing the dead bodies of at least 101 women and girls aged between nine and 100. He had committed the crimes between 2005 and 2020 while working as a general maintenance worker at the now-closed Kent and Sussex Hospital and the Tunbridge Wells Hospital, where he had used his access-all-areas swipe card to enter the morgues. Fuller initially denied murder - but he pleaded guilty to the two murders on the sixth day of the trial in 2021. He was given a whole-life prison term. Melanie’s body was found at 5.30am in a pool of blood just 200 metres from her home in Bath, after she was killed in a frenzied attack while making her way home from a nightclub in June 1984. The 17-year-old had been stabbed 26 times through her clothing, which her murderer removed to rape her before redressing her. Police took swabs from 71 blood spots at the murder scene, as well as from the teenager’s clothing and body. DNA analysis wasn’t available at the time, but police kept the samples, and when the DNA national database was launched, samples of semen from the scene were analysed. There was no match from the database at the time, but scientific advances later meant that familial DNA could also be identified, a breakthrough which, 30 years later, would prove crucial to the case. In 2014, a 41-year-old woman was arrested following a petty domestic dispute, and her DNA was taken and added to the police database. When, the following year, the DNA testing for Melanie’s murderer was rerun, a match was found with the woman. Her father, 64-year-old painter and decorator Christopher Hampton, was found to match samples from the scene and in 2016 he was jailed for life after pleading guilty to the murder. Detectives said his wife, who he married in 1989, and his two children, had no idea about his terrible secret. Trainee hairdresser Colette Aram was 16 when she was snatched off the street as she walked the short distance to her boyfriend’s house in October 1983. Bundling her into a stolen Ford Fiesta, her attacker beat her about the head with a bottle before raping her, strangling her with his bare hands and arranging her body in a sexually-provocative pose in a nearby field in the village of Keyworth, Notts. Five weeks later, the killer wrote a letter to police, goading them with the words: “You will never get me”. As the trail ran cold the case featured on the first episode of the BBC ’s Crimewatch in June 1984, but that also produced no more clues, and over the next 26 years the culprit continued to write anonymous letters to police about the murder. And the man, Paul Hutchinson, would probably have got away with it if his son hadn’t been detained in 2019 for a traffic offence, and had his DNA taken. It matched with the profile of Colette’s killer, using DNA taken from his letter, which police had uploaded when the database was launched 24 years earlier. So sure he had covered up his crime, Hutchison had continued living six miles from the murder scene, marrying twice and fathering four children while working as a newspaper delivery agent and helping as his estate’s tenants’ representative. Initially blaming the murder on his dead brother, Hutchinson changed his plea to guilty a month before the case went to trial after detectives revealed they had managed to get a DNA sample of his brother and it didn’t match. In January 2010 he was jailed for a minimum term of 25 years, but was found dead in his cell after overdosing on antidepressants ten months later.